Tori Stafford trial: Blood stains found in accused's car

LONDON, Ont. — Two minuscule bloodstains found in the car and on a gym bag of a man charged with killing eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford contain DNA that can be matched with near certainty to the Ontario schoolgirl, a court heard Wednesday.

Lead forensic investigator Jennifer McLean testified she found the droplets — measuring only a few millimetres each — on the rubber moulding of the rear passenger door of a 2003 Honda Civic and on the bottom of a GoodLife gym bag belonging to the accused, Michael Rafferty.

Both were blood mixtures from at least two or three people.

The likelihood that one of the DNA profiles in the samples coming from someone other than Stafford is a one in a 150 trillion chance for the blood found in the car and one in 28 billion chance for the blood on the bag, McLean explained.

Further tests found that blood, highly probable Rafferty's, also was discovered on the bag found in the car, McLean said.

Rafferty, 31, has pleaded not guilty to abduction, sexual assault causing bodily harm and first-degree murder in the death of the Grade 3 student.

Stafford was last seen April 8, 2009, outside an elementary school in Woodstock, Ont., a city of 35,000 about 120 kilometres west of Toronto.

On July 19, 2009, her remains were found covered in garbage bags and buried under a rock pile in a rural clearing near Mount Forest, Ont.

An autopsy found she died from blunt force trauma to the head, most likely caused by multiple strikes with a hammer.

Two years ago Terri-Lynne McClintic, 21, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison for Stafford's death.

McLean explained that science could never prove exactly who the DNA belongs to with absolute certainty. Once investigators get a match, they can only provide the probability of the profile belonging to someone other than the person it matched for comparison. This is because it is impossible to run these tests against the DNA of everyone in the world, she said.

During this investigation, McLean told the court she and her colleagues at the Ontario Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto tested 84 items for DNA matches.

She looked for semen, saliva and blood and then compared it to DNA gathered from Rafferty and McClintic.

Samples of Stafford's DNA, which were taken from a tooth and a hair from a lice comb, also were used during the analysis.

McLean told the court she also found blood, believed to be McClintic's, mixed with semen, which she said likely belonged to Rafferty, on the front passenger seat of the dark blue spray-painted car.

The chances of it not belonging to the two are one in 11 trillion and one in 250 billion respectively, she testified.

Saliva, highly probable, she said, to be Rafferty's also was swabbed from the front driver's seat.

McLean told the court she also tested a number of other items for bodily fluids, including the Hannah Montana T-shirt in which Stafford's remains were found, along with samples from her body but due to the severe decomposition, no matches could be made.

Even the garbage bags used to wrap the girl were in a condition that made it nearly impossible to test it for DNA.

A number of photos of the Honda Civic, which was littered with clothing, shoes, a blanket and water bottles, also were shown to the court Wednesday.

It took forensic investigators nearly two days in May 2009 to remove all the items and to catalogue them at the Ontario Provincial Police facility in Tillsonburg, Ont.

Earlier, Barbara Doupe, an expert in hair and fibre evidence and textile damage assessment, told the court she recovered two blond hairs on a pea coat found in Rafferty's home.

It's unclear whose hair it was.

Doupe testified she also found a 3.5 cm by 0.5 cm piece of fabric in the rear floor of Rafferty's car that was "indistinguishable" from the fabric of a car seat. Scientists could not make any DNA matches on this evidence.

As the Crown's star witness, McClintic told the court last month, Stafford was covered with a black jacket and forced to crouch on the floor of the Honda during the more than two hours it took them to drive to Mount Forest.

McClintic testified that once they got to the rural clearing, she watched Rafferty rape the girl.

This sent her into a rage over her own childhood abuse leading her to use a hammer to fatally strike Stafford in the head, McClintic claimed.

She had also alleged that following the murder, she cut out pieces of the car back seat with a blue utility knife.

A knife missing a blade matching its description was recovered but the vehicle's back seat was never found.

On Wednesday, jurors also heard from Alexis Lane, a former girlfriend and classmate of Rafferty.

The 30-year-old woman said the two were childhood friends when they were both living in Drayton, Ont., a village south of Mount Forest.

"We were all friends," said Lane. "We talked on the phone all the time."

They reconnected in 2009 and dated for several months until April 1 that year — just days before Stafford was abducted.

The last time they saw each other was at the end of March, and she testified that she was driven around in his Honda a number of times.

"Everything was normal — clean," said Lane. She didn't recall the car's back seat missing.

The Crown will continue its case Thursday with more DNA evidence from McLean.